Ekener, Elisabeth
Hansson, Julia
and
Gustavsson, Mathias
2017.
Addressing positive impacts in social LCA—discussing current and new approaches exemplified by the case of vehicle fuels.
The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment,

The concept of ecosystem services (ES), the benefits humans derive from ecosystems, is increasingly applied to environmental conservation, human well-being and poverty alleviation, and to inform the development of interventions. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) implicitly recognize the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of maintaining ES, through monetary compensation from ‘winners’ to ‘losers’. Some research into PES has examined how such schemes affect poverty, while other literature addresses trade-offs between different ES. However, much evolving ES literature adopts an aggregated perspective of humans and their well-being, which can disregard critical issues for poverty alleviation. This paper identifies four issues with examples from coastal ES in developing countries. First, different groups derive well-being benefits from different ES, creating winners and losers as ES, change. Second, dynamic mechanisms of access determine who can benefit. Third, individuals' contexts and needs determine how ES contribute to well-being. Fourth, aggregated analyses may neglect crucial poverty alleviation mechanisms such as cash-based livelihoods. To inform the development of ES interventions that contribute to poverty alleviation, disaggregated analysis is needed that focuses on who derives which benefits from ecosystems, and how such benefits contribute to the well-being of the poor. These issues present challenges in data availability and selection of how and at which scales to disaggregate. Disaggregation can be applied spatially, but should also include social groupings, such as gender, age and ethnicity, and is most important where inequality is greatest. Existing tools, such as stakeholder analysis and equity weights, can improve the relevance of ES research to poverty alleviation.

To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute
them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services.
Please confirm that you accept the terms of use.

To send this article to your Dropbox account, please
select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise
Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account.
Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute
them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services.
Please confirm that you accept the terms of use.

To send this article to your Google Drive account, please
select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise
Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account.
Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute
them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services.
Please confirm that you accept the terms of use.